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Microsoft's 'awareness' of Intersoft products

A coworker of mine pointed out an article on Intersoft's support board discussing their approach to integrating with ASP.NET 2.0. The company has said they will wait for the actual release to port their products which is unfortunate. As part of the discussion, the person who posted the note mentioned spending time at Microsoft's compatibility lab in Redmond. While the Microsoft employees were familiar with some 3rd party ASP.NET grids (Infragistics and others), they were not aware of the Intersoft products including WebGrid.NET.

I think this lack of awareness is unfortunate as the Intersoft WebGrid is doing some things with ASP.NET that are pretty cutting edge - namely the OnTheFly Postback capability. The product has received excellent reviews with its only criticism being that it's an IE-only solution. However, that is changing now that they are rolling out a Gecko-compatible solution. While I wouldn't expect Microsoft employees to be aware of the entire market-place, I always find that keeping an eye on the 'edges' of markets where people are doing things fundamentally different than anyone else is important because 5-10% (personal guess) of what they do is a reflection of what will be mainstreamed in the future. Intersoft is pretty tight-lipped around the design they have implemented, but from what I've seen it's a fundamental piece of plumbing that can be applied to a large number of control scenarios.

Published Apr 12 2005, 11:47 AM by shebert

Filed under: Development, Intersoft WebGrid.NET

Comments

Sam said:

I agree it's a really nice product overall, and it's supported with rather frequent builds/hotfixes, but I find issue support lacking. They've completely ignored the slowdown issue with large results since I checked last, and where normally I'd expect a company to say "this is what you're doing wrong", they don't. They just blamed it on the Infragistics menus I was using and called it a day. Well, the previous versions worked fine with the Infragistics stuff, so I'd at least like an explanation if not a fix, but Intersoft just passed the buck.

Not my idea of good support. Not to mention since I'm in US Central Time, and they're in I dunno where, it takes two days to even get an email back from them asking for more info if I submit a support ticket. Then another few days with trouble-shooting tips, and back and forth. I don't have time for that.

And considering they're by far the most expensive WebGrid I'm aware of, until they fix their support, and add Gecko support, we definitely won't be renewing/upgrading our licenses.

As far as what it does: Besides some slick Ajax-like javascript for virtual-paging, most of it's pretty standard (though tedious) javascript fanciness. I'd disagree that it's "fundamentally different". A lot of it is pretty easy to implement if you take it a bite at a time. The hard part is performance and bugs I think. Just looking at the list of releases for the last year should tell you it's not the best tested product around. :)

# April 12, 2005 9:28 PM

Stephen Hebert said:

I certainly agree their support is their weakpoint. They are located in Jakarta, Indonesia and time-zone matchups don't work well for me either (CST). They've always been responsive (minus the day time lag) and their sample code is pretty useful.

Expense-wise I can see your point if you are implementing one central site. In my case, we're delivering packaged software where the web server is remotely located per purchase. In this case, I can't beat their pricing against others on the market.

The piece I find fundamentally different is when you switch the VirtualLoad property to Custom and additional page requests are posted back to the server (without a full postpack). The grid is populated with the additional data and the user continues using the product. This is how we've implemented our grids to avoid long data loads for large requests.

Given the javascript handiwork and large volume of javascript being generated by the grid, we've seen that IIS6 data compression (IIS5's never has worked) is very important in minimizing traffic volume.

# April 13, 2005 7:48 AM